Like Pulling Teeth

            Every day after recess we have ELD or “Talking Time” from 10:25-10:55.  My CT does the “beginners” group so some of the time I assist her and some of the time I lead the lesson.  The focus is simply on developing students’ understanding of grammar and it also gives them an opportunity to begin using academic language. 

            One of the lessons this week was based around the question of “How many children are in your family?” where students reply “I have ____ children in my family” or “He/She has ______ children in his/her family” which are written on sentence strips for the students.  This seemed simple enough to me and my CT but this lesson was one of those where you literally feel like you are pulling teeth.  Especially because we were trying to get our students to say the questions and answers in order to participate, which is much harder than having them circle an answer or copy something off the board like so much of the rest of school is formatted (especially when your students do not read yet and the sentence strips mean nothing to them).  This lesson basically relies on their memorization of the sentence frames for the question and answer and does not give opportunities to students who are not great at instantly memorizing sentences. 

            My CT concluded that the students were off that day and asked them if they were having a hard time focusing and working to which the students all agreed.  She then switched to playing alphabet bingo and encouraged the students to say “I have the letter ___” or “I do not have the letter ___” after she held up each letter.  This went so much smoother and the students were clearly more interested in this game because they were not as off-task (talking to neighbor, touching neighbor, looking around, playing with clothes/shoes, playing with the rug, etc.).    

            As I thought about it later, I couldn’t help but wonder why we are only using sentence strips in ELD.  I know teachers are trying to distance themselves from reading and writing during ELD because this is the beginners group and the students do not have much of a grasp on English yet, but it also seems a mistake to make everything oral.  If a student didn’t understand what was being said in the question, then they wouldn’t be able to form an answer or might not know how to form an answer even when given a sentence frame.  This is a time when pictures are crucial, either on cheesy flash cards or digitally on the board.  Maybe if students were able to see what they were expected to talk about, they could create their own replies and actually know what they were talking about.  In addition to getting kids talking, ELD is about teaching kids what they are talking about.  I think my 4-morning takeover in December will be a great time for me to implement some new ideas in ELD.  I’ll keep you posted.